Erik Davis, author of the Joanna Newsom story on the cover of the new Arthur, is in NYC this week for two speaking engagements:

1.
Visionary Art and Architecture: A Conversation between Alex Grey and Erik Davis
An evening event: Thursday, December 7th, 7pm, $20
Location: Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, 540 West 27th Street, 4th floor

“This evening, one of the world’s greatest contemporary visionary artists, NYC’s own renowned Alex Grey, and the San Francisco cultural critic Erik Davis will engage in a spirited dialogue about the role of visionary art and architecture. Grey will discuss the history of sacred art and the aspirations embedded in his own work, ranging from his extraordinary paintings and sculptures to his design of the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. Davis will draw from his brand new book, The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape, which weaves deeply informed text and stunning images into a compelling narrative of religion, architecture and consciousness in California. Don’t miss this meeting of two dazzling minds.”

2.
The Visionary State: The Legacy of California Consciousness
Erik Davis
An evening lecture and slide presentation: Friday, December 8th, 8pm, $20
Location: NY Open Center, 83 Spring Street

“California has served as ground zero for an emerging spirituality based on ecology, the body and the technology of human transformation. The state’s ebullient spiritual landscape has spawned the likes of neopaganism, televangelism, UFO cults, austere Zen Buddhism, Esalen, mavericks such as Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley, popular visionaries such as Starhawk and Carlos Castaneda, and the nightmarish Charles Manson and Jim Jones. In this slideshow and talk, based on his fascinating new book, The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape, Erik Davis will take us on a wild ride, exploring the history and legacy of ‘California consciousness.'”

“Erik Davis (www.techgnosis.com), a San Francisco-based cultural critic, is the author of The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape and Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information. He has contributed to dozens of books and magazines and has given lectures and workshops at universities, conferences and festivals all over the world.”

Power to the people

When John Lennon announced a US tour in 1971, the White House set out to stop him. But, as John Patterson discovers, he wasn’t the first musician to have the The Man on his case – and he wouldn’t be the last

Saturday December 2, 2006
The Guardian

The author of the following words was FBI Director J Edgar Hoover. Try and guess who he’s talking about in this memo to Richard Nixon “[He is]… a paradox because he is difficult to judge by the normal standards of civilized life … His main reason for being is to destroy, blindly and indiscriminately, to tear down and provoke chaos …”
Ho Chi Minh? Mao Tse-Tung? Charles Manson, even?

Wrong. He’s warning the White House about that renowned subversive and enemy of the state, John Lennon. Hoover’s bizarre and paranoid outburst is one of the many secrets and revelations that enliven David Leaf and John Scheinfeld’s The US Vs John Lennon. Their documentary focuses on Lennon’s political activities in the early 1970s, in the period after he moved to New York, and on the hysterical reaction of the FBI and the Nixon White House to the “threat” of a man whose benign political worldview was plainly stated in his widely-available music.

Lennon first caught the interest of Hoover and Nixon – allies since the McCarthy witchhunts – in late 1971, when he made a $75,000 donation to an outfit called the Election Year Strategy Information Center, which was gearing up to register voters for the 1972 US Presidential election. With the Vietnam war still in full swing, Lennon’s donation was the first move of a planned US tour, during which he hoped to set up voter-registration booths in concert-venue lobbies and get as many young people signed up as possible, in the hope of voting Nixon out. In previous years this would have gone unnoticed, but the recent passage of the 26th Amendment to the US Constitution, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, meant that there might have been a discernible effect on the election. No one at this point knew that, thanks to the energetic “ratfucking” activities of his political operatives in 1972, Nixon would win in a landslide, and since this would be Lennon’s first US tour since the Beatles quit touring in 1966, it was conceivable that the kids could sign up and throw the Trickster out.

If you can judge a man by the quality of his political enemies, then Lennon was a titan. The White House first got wind of his tour from the ghastly racist dinosaur Strom Thurmond, the segregationist presidential candidate of 1948, who tipped off US Attorney General (and future jailbird) John Mitchell. CIA director Richard Helms meanwhile sent a similar memo to Hoover. And thus a plan was put into motion to have Lennon deported from the USA on a minor visa violation as a way of silencing him.

It won’t spoil this interesting, if occasionally wishy-washy, VH-1 documentary (released on the 25th anniversary of Lennon’s death) to reveal that the Hoover-Nixon effort failed. But the movie is fascinating as much for its historical and contemporary echoes as it is for its many revelations of this forgotten saga.

Hoover, his agents, and those on America’s political right had by 1971 built up a long and disgraceful record of harassing musicians and singers who dared to speak up against social injustice, racism and government criminality. Lennon had Beatle money, celebrity and top-notch lawyers to hide behind, and was thus well-insulated against the day-to-day abuses that the FBI and the US government often wielded against left-wing dissidents with emptier pockets.

John Sinclair, the manager of Detroit’s politically radical MC5, was jailed for 10 years, ostensibly for the possession of two joints, but really in order to silence the leader of Detroit’s political freak-scene, prompting Lennon’s solo single Free John Sinclair and his appearance at a 1971 benefit. Also appearing there was folkie-activist Phil Ochs, a veteran of the Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy campaigns of 1968, a co-founder of the Yippies, and proud possessor of an FBI file that ran 410 pages to Lennon’s mere 280.

Ochs was far more politically active than Lennon, and given to such wised-up conceits as “If there’s any hope of a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara.” When he was brutally mugged in Dar Es Salaam in 1973, he speculated that the US government was behind the three men who choked him and caused him to lose the upper three notes of his vocal range. Perhaps he was being paranoid about this. That’s what people thought when he claimed the FBI had a fat file on him, though, and he was right about that.

None of this was new. Back in the 1940s and 1950s the black singer Paul Robeson, a communist sympathiser and an outspoken foe of racism in America and imperialism in Africa, was stripped of his US passport, barred from performing, and hounded by the FBI. The most famous instance of The Man harassing Robeson and his ilk came in August 1949, when he gave a concert at Peekskill in upper New York state, attended by 25,000 fans. Peekskill was a notoriously reactionary community, with its own active Ku Klux Klan chapter. After the open-air concert, the local police, all 900 of them, deliberately channelled the exiting concertgoers down a rural access road lined with jeering rightwingers. All along the four-mile road, police stood by as hundreds of thugs, screaming “Run, you white niggers!” and “Jew! Jew! Jew!” hurled bricks through car windows, pulled men, women and children from their vehicles and beat them. One man was blinded and hundreds injured as folk singers including Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Lee Hays tried to escape.

Seeger and Hays were also members of The Weavers, a folk quartet who charted in 1950 with a version of Lead Belly’s Goodnight Irene before a mention in the commie-baiting tract Red channels (used by TV executives to keep left-wingers off the air) put them on the blacklist, killing their career and losing them their recording contract.

If you believe this sort of nativist fascism has disappeared in George Bush’s America, think again. The new documentary Shut Up And Sing! outlines the travails of the Dixie Chicks after singer Natalie Maines told a London audience on the eve of the Iraq war that “We’re ashamed the President of the United States comes from Texas.”

In scenes that recalled the aftermath of Lennon’s “Bigger than Jesus” remark in 1966, Dixie Chicks CDs were burned across the South, and they were blacklisted from 1200 radio stations owned by the Clear Channel conglomerate – which early in the war drew up a do-not-play shit-list of songs that included Imagine. At a filmed Senate hearing, senator John McCain takes the CEO of Clear Channel apart over his risible claim that his stations all acted independently, when memos prove exactly the opposite. The Chicks went from being Red-state superstars to left-wing cult artists almost overnight, but surprisingly, they found they liked it. At the end of the movie, it’s inspiring to see Maines belting out her answer-song to the fanbase that abandoned her: “I’m not ready to make nice/I’m not ready to back down …”

It’s tempting to think that the Dixie Chicks inspired Bruce Springsteen this year to record an album of protest songs made famous by Pete Seeger, as if to prove that nothing, not Peekskill, not Red Channels or Clear Channel, not Nixon or Hoover, can be allowed to shut up a dissenting singer’s voice.

“Rock and the Pop Narcotic is a 1991 book of popular music criticism by Joe Carducci. (Revised edition 1995.)

“Rock and the Pop Narcotic is perhaps the only book of popular music criticism that attempts to achieve a genuine aesthetic of rock music. Other works, such as Richard Meltzer’s The Aesthetics of Rock or Simon Frith’s Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, either focus on lyrical content or on the sociology of the music’s listeners. Rock and the Pop Narcotic is both a critique of the sociological approach and a polemic in favour of the music’s artistic qualities. During the rest of the 1990s the book gradually acquired cult status, with record producer Simon Napier-Bell citing it as one of his ten favourite music books in the UK’s Guardian newspaper in 2005. Clinton Heylin included two chapters in The Penguin Anthology of Rock Writing, with the remark, “Rock and the Pop Narcotic…may well be the most important critique on rock music written in the last 10 years.”

WHO IS JOE CARDUCCI?:
Following is from Wikipedia…

“Joe Carducci is a writer, record producer, and former A&R executive, formerly most closely associated with the influential record label SST Records. Biographical information on Joe Carducci can be hard to come by. He was born in Merced, California in 1955 but grew up in Naperville, Illinois. He also lived for a time in Chicago in the late 1970’s where he ran an independent mail-order record retailer. From 1981 to 1986 he was an A&R man and record producer for SST Records, working with among other bands the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, Black Flag and Saccharine Trust. He wrote lyrics for the song “Jesus & Tequila” by the Minutemen (Double Nickels on the Dime, 1984) and “Chinese Firedrill” from Mike Watt’s 1995 solo album Ball-Hog or Tugboat?. He now resides in Wyoming, where he runs Redoubt Press. Carducci is probably best known as the author of Rock and the Pop Narcotic. Carducci wrote the screenplays for the 1998 films Rock and Roll Punk and Bullet On A Wire, and has other script projects in the works.”

“What approach can we take to move beyond environmental protests and actually begin living sustainably wherever we are located?

“Planet Drum was founded in 1973 to provide an effective grassroots approach to ecology that emphasizes sustainability, community self-determination and regional self-reliance. In association with community activists and ecologists, Planet Drum developed the concept of a bioregion: a distinct area with coherent and interconnected plant and animal communities, and natural systems, often defined by a watershed. A bioregion is a whole “life-place” with unique requirements for human inhabitation so that it will not be disrupted and injured. Through its projects, publications, speakers, and workshops, Planet Drum helps start new bioregional groups and encourages local organizations and individuals to find ways to live within the natural confines of bioregions…”

Courtesy White Rainbow!